Colleen Oakley Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: Before I Go → Close Enough to Touch → You Were There Too
If you like love stories with a what-if twist: You Were There Too → The Invisible Husband of Frick Island
If you want humor and unlikely friendship: The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise
If you want marriage comedy with real suspense: Jane and Dan at the End of the World
If you're curious about her earlier non-fiction work: Love Notes

Colleen Oakley writes the kind of books that start with a slightly wild premise and land somewhere very human. Before she became a novelist, she spent years in magazines, working as a senior editor at Marie Claire and editor in chief of Women's Health & Fitness, then publishing essays and articles in places like The New York Times, Parade, Redbook, and Woman's Day. That journalism background still matters. Even her oddest fictional ideas feel researched, lived-in, and emotionally plausible.

Oakley is a graduate of the University of Georgia's school of journalism, and her move into fiction seems to have happened the way a lot of real career shifts do, slowly, around everything else. She wrote her first novel after years in editorial work, often in the margins of family life while raising young children. Her debut, Before I Go, came out in 2015 and immediately showed what she does well: humor, heartbreak, and characters who feel like real people even in impossible situations.

She did not come to novels from a writing cabin and a five-hour morning routine.

Readers often come to Oakley for the hook and stay for the heart. Before I Go follows a young wife with terminal cancer who tries to find a new partner for her husband. Close Enough to Touch centers on a librarian whose rare allergy to human touch has pushed her into near-total isolation. You Were There Too asks what happens when the stranger you have dreamed about for years turns up in real life, and says he has been dreaming about you too.

Her books can sound a little wild when you pitch them out loud, but that is part of the fun.

Then there is The Invisible Husband of Frick Island, set on a tiny Chesapeake Bay island where a widow keeps living as if her dead husband is still beside her, while the whole town quietly helps her hold that belief together. In The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise, an aimless young woman and her elderly employer wind up on the run in a funny, sharp road-trip story with a mystery at its core. And Jane and Dan at the End of the World drops a marriage in trouble into a hostage crisis at an expensive restaurant. Oakley clearly likes to start with a bold what-if and then worry about the feelings after.

Underneath those plots, her favorite subjects are pretty consistent. She writes about grief, marriage, second chances, women at crossroads, families under stress, and people trying to build a life that still feels possible after things go sideways. She also has a knack for balancing tones. Her books can be funny, sad, tense, and hopeful in the same chapter, which is a big part of why readers connect with them.

The books have reached a wide audience. Oakley is a USA Today bestselling author, her work has been translated into more than 21 languages, Close Enough to Touch won the French Reader's Prize, and her novels have twice been longlisted for the Southern Book Prize. Several have also been optioned for film, which makes sense given how visual and premise-driven they often are.

These days she lives in Atlanta with her husband, four kids, Baxter, and a few backyard chickens. That life sounds busy, and maybe that is part of the appeal of her fiction too. For all the unusual setups, her books are deeply interested in ordinary love, domestic mess, and the strange ways people keep going.